End Times

[Responding to an acquaintance who posits that reports from the Vatican state that the late John Paul II may have wondered if Dubya was the Antichrist.]

That's giving George waaaaaay too much credit ...

Although Karl Rove does nicely as the False Prophet.

The whole end-of-world-Revelations thing is great Cecile Demille theater, but it's a gross misinterpretation of the text. As noted earlier in these pages, John was writing a tract against his political and theological contemporaries, not predicting the future.

But when the Catholic church put the Bible together hundreds of years later, they didn't have the reference to the images, so they assumed that John was predicting that the world pretty much resets itself to the time of Jesus and the drama plays out again. (Satan, of course, being a complete nincompoop, falls completely for this.) It's like someone a thousand years from now trying to figure out what donkeys and elephants meant regarding political leadership to someone looking over cartoons without a frame of reference to view them through. They might come to the conclusion that these were icons of gods representing factions in some kind of religious argument.

I don't understand the nutcases' love of The End. I like the world. It's got bunny rabbits and little babies, beautiful sunsets and professional baseball. Whenever the JW's come 'round to talk, we get stick on the "how rotten the world is" thing. "But you read so many bad things in the paper", they say. Yeah, because that's what sells newspapers, so that's what we get. I mean, it really isn't news when the plane takes off and lands safely. And still, besides all that, we've got bunnies and babies and baseball. I can tell they can't understand why I'm not down on all existence, but that's me. Still looking for the Giants to get back to the World Series.

Now, I would say something like, "No end of the world 'til the Giants win the World Series", but I've learned my lesson there. In August 2002 I swore after my cancer diagnosis that I wasn't dying until the Giants won the World Series. Two months later they won Game One of the Series and had to beg the Powers That Be for a quick re-phrasing.